Baltrice said, “So what’s this fiendish task?”
Tezzeret stood. “I am to find a Planeswalker known as Crucius the Mad Sphinx, who was last seen here on Esper, some decades ago,” he said. “By literally no coincidence at all, he is that other Planeswalker I spoke of just now-the one being in the Multiverse who is better at handling etherium than I am. At least, I believe him to be superior, and I think I am justified in my belief by the fact that it was Crucius who invented etherium in the first place, and that Crucius is to this day the only being who ever has had the ability to create it.”
“Oh, I get it,” Baltrice said. “A little extra incentive, right? So you want me to think that if you and I can find him, he’ll be able to take care of Beleren… and I won’t need you anymore.”
“That is an accurate summary of the situation.”
“You expect me to believe it? You can’t smell the giant pile of Way Too Convenient heaped on top of that story?”
Tezzeret’s lips compressed briefly, and after a moment he nodded. “There are a number of features of my new life that seem to be, well… overly contrived is, I think, the best description,” he said slowly. “As though I had set about to create an entirely new machine, then found the parts already manufactured and laid out precisely in order on my workbench. Having been conscious for less than twenty-four hours, I have been too busy trying to survive to spare any time for deep analysis of my situation. I surmise that there is an underlying teleology here, but I have not yet been able to verify it.”
“Sucks to be you, huh?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “The pertinent detail is that I have been forced into a role very like the one I had originally intended for you, Jace. I discover that I don’t like it any better than you did, and I have decided-not being a notably original thinker, after all-to employ the same solution you did.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Nicol Bolas,” he said. “You remember Nicol Bolas.”
“Only in bad dreams.”
“I’m going to kill him,” he said as though he was commenting it looked like rain.
It was a good thing I was already sitting down. I could only stare. Baltrice spluttered like a balky skyrocket. “You… you what? Are you completely frappin’ cracked?”
“Very likely. But cracked or not, the fact remains,” he said. “I am going to kill Nicol Bolas.”
“Oh, sure,” I said when I found my voice. “And while you’re off burning down three-quarters of the Multiverse, I’m supposed to sit here in Vectis with my thumb up my butt?”
“Not at all. You,” said Tezzeret with that eerie calm that was starting to look more and more like crazy every time I saw it, “are going to look after my father.”
THE METAL ISLAND
A curious feature of human memory,” Bolas murmured as he disengaged his brilliant blue memory siphon from Jace Beleren’s brain, and returned the mind-ripper’s unconscious body to the plinth with oddly gentle care. “You remember being in pain, but you don’t remember the pain itself.”
Nearby, Tezzeret still hung in a Web of Restraint, though a less uncomfortable one. “I suspect,” he said, “that it’s an artifact of construction.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The human brain is largely a signal-processing apparatus. As such, it is divided into specialized sectors. Pain is a product of specific neural activity in a specific sector of the brain. Memory arises of neural activity in a different sector. The pain sector is not activated in the process, except in pathological cases. If it hurt as much to remember pain as it had to experience it, there would be little disincentive to repeat the experience. Which would defeat the design function of pain in the first place.”
“Of course-the lecture on mechanics. You’re so predictable.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Tezzeret replied. “Reliability is the most useful objective measure of superior design.”
The dragon’s brows arched to a comically skeptical height. “Am I to believe that your personal design is supposedly superior? And if it weren’t, am I to believe that you would actually admit it?”
“My design,” Tezzeret replied imperturbably, “is a work in progress. I find myself more interested in what you’re not talking about. And why.”
“Tezzie, Tezzie, come on. Do you actually expect me to waste breath discussing your preposterous vanity? It’s just you and me here, Tezzie. You don’t have to pretend that you really believe you can kill me. How about we just stipulate the truth and move on, shall we?”
Tezzeret said, “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not prepared to stipulate. It’s not the truth.”
The dragon belched a gust of incredulous laughter. “Are you prepared to stipulate that you’re batshit insane?” he said.
“And which of us is the more predictable, after all?” Tezzeret said. “Whenever confronted with something you do not understand, you dismiss it as irrelevant, misconstructed, or damaged.”
“Does being completely staggering cracked count as a design flaw?”
“Not necessarily,” Tezzeret said. “What if I am insane, but also right? Perhaps being completely staggering cracked is not so much a design flaw as it is a fillip of stylistic excess-baroque filigree on a headsman’s axe, if you see what I mean.”
“Were you always this nuts? Did I just not notice?”
“I can’t say,” he replied. “However, you should bear in mind that whatever I am now-how well or poorly I function-is largely the result of your own talents, or lack thereof, as a designer; the result of your presumed gifts as an artificer of human flesh. It seems clear to me that you were less than wholly satisfied with who I was previously. When you restored my consciousness and functionality, I can only assume that you made certain alterations. You would not be the first artificer to discover that his device exhibits unexpected-perhaps unwelcome, even actively dangerous-features, as a result of insufficient foresight, skill, and preparation.”
Bolas chuckled. “So whatever’s wrong with you is all my fault, eh? Because you’re just a machine.”
“Hardly,” Tezzeret said. “No competent artificer would design humans as we are: so limited an array of operating environments; so many useless parts; vital systems so inefficient and prone to breakdown that the vast bulk of the energy we expend is wasted in mere maintenance-maintenance which, even if performed perfectly, is still insufficient to materially lengthen productive life span. Not to mention that we are difficult to repair, and prohibitively expensive to replace.”
Bolas exposed jagged teeth within a curl of a grin. “It was my understanding that, mm, human replacements, to use your term, are not only free, but that, ah, their construction is considered an enjoyable recreation.”
“Think of it in machine terms,” Tezzeret said. “Preliminary assembly puts the constructing unit-the mother-on reduced service for, on average, one third of the gestational period, while consuming even more resources than she had before. Once born, a human is not functional; primary assembly requires, on average, seven years, during which the child is literally nothing but an energy sink, consuming time, attention, and food without any return except dung. To achieve full physical function requires, on average, about sixteen years. And this leaves aside questions of training and education, emotional stability, and the disciplined intellect necessary for self-direction, all of which require even more time and energy to inculcate. If people had any idea just how expensive a human being actually is, they’d take better care of themselves.”
“You’re awfully chatty, all of a sudden.”
“With less than one thousandth the energy expenditure that creating a fully functional human being requires,” Tezzeret went on, “I could design and build a device capable of everything a human can do, including creative problem solving, singing, writing poetry, whatever you like-not to mention creating its own replacements-and do it for a thousand years.”